Mnchhausen Manoeuvres

Steven Connor

An extended version of a review of Slavoj iek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London and New York: Verso, 2012) and Sen Sheehan, iek: A Guide for the Perplexed. published in the Times Literary Supplement, 26th October, 2012, pp. 21-2.

Everybody knows, or thinks they do, how Hegel thinks history goes. At each point in history, spirit (us, in a way) meets with its limiting or negative antagonist in the form of matter (as it might be, the world) The resulting conflict is resolved by a sublation, in which spirit assimilates to itself the very conflict between itself and its antagonist, thereby both preserving and overcoming the opposition. By this means, spirit steadily increases its repertoire, and matter is steadily engrossed by spirit. The Hegelian story of the engorgement of Spirit through history has been held responsible for every kind of modern totalitarianism, fascist or communist, and, in that the key principle of postmodernism has been a rejection of the horizon of totality, the denunciation of the Hegelian dialectic has been at the core of most forms of postmodernism. In a number of previous publications, and now in this everlasting gobstopper of a book, Slavoj iek insists that this view of Hegel is completely mistaken, thereby managing both to discredit postmodernist arguments insofar as they depend on a dishing of Hegel, and thoroughly to endorse the objections to totality that are key to those postmodernist arguments.

Not that iek has any desire to discredit the dialectical alternation of assertion and negation. But, while agreeing that it provides the time-signature for history, ieks version of the Hegelian dialectic places the stress on the off-beat, or negative phase of Spirits self-division rather than the on-beat of Spirits steady consolidation. History is therefore, says iek, not written in the waltz time of the number 3 (the reconciliation of opposites in synthesis), as is usually assumed, but rather in a kind of syncopated two-step of a 2 seen not as the duality of polar opposites, but 2 as the inherent self-distancing of the One itself (474). Here is the most important, and most pitilessly reiterated aspect of ieks reading of Hegel. Spirit, or the Subject, in no sense come before, or simply undergo negation. Rather, for iek, it is duality that is primary, with oneness being plucked out retroactively from a primary condition of division.

The idea of retroactivity is at the core of Less Than Nothing, and the preoccupation in particular of the chapter entitled Is It Still Possible To Be An Hegelian Today? It argues that Hegel shows us the force of the future anterior, that is, the effect that excretes its own cause, the act that generates its own norm, the utterance that produces its own intention, the subject that posits its own content. The book provides many examples of the kind of Mnchhausen manoeuvre that is often taken as a sign of faulty or paradoxical reasoning but is here actively and defiantly embraced. For iek, bootstrap operations are the motive principle of history and politics, since [e]very authentic act creates its own conditions of possibility (649). There is a characteristic circularity here, for it seems clear in any case that the only meaning that could attach to the word authentic for iek would be having no cause extrinsic to itself, not that the demonstration of such circularity could count for anything but a further proof of the autogenic authority of the self-born. What is important about

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the revolutionary impulse is therefore not that it is a screwing of historical contradictions to their sticking point, but that it comes out of nothing, and then subsequently determines its own history by back-formation. In the io-Hegelian dialectic of history, each new stage rewrites the past and retroactively de-legitimizes the previous one (219). Not surprisingly, given the patrician cast of his contempt for all that is vulgar, stupid or pusillanimous, iek also has an adoring fascination with tyrants, monarchs and producers of power through pure appearance. At one remarkable moment, he quotes (without naming her) Lillian Hellmans story that when Dashiell Hammett was imprisoned for refusing to testify to what iek (mistakenly) says was the House Un-American Activities Committee, the guards began after only two weeks to address him as Sir, this being, in ieks grovelling estimate, proof of the extraordinary power and dignity of his personality (521). The lickspittle attachment to self-legitimating authority (die Partei hat immer recht reads his epigraph, the old tease) is the love that cannot help blurting out its name in ieks work.

Retroactivity even extends bizarrely into the future, in what iek, borrowing a term from Franz Brentano, calls teleiosis, since [e]ach historical form is a totality which encompasses not only its retroactively posited past, but also its own future, a future which is by definition never realized (914). One of the more perverse consequences of this is that iek must advise fellow-communists to abstain from any positive imagination of the communist future, or even seeking out promising intimations of that felicity-to-come in the present: for that would be illegitimately to tie that hands of a future that, if it is truly authentic, can be relied upon to whistle up its forerunners and preconditions for itself (222-3). I think iek knows perfectly well how little this prospect will appeal to most, even if he genuinely does not really understand what people like me might find so appalling about it, but, like the fat boy in Pickwick, he is addicted to making our flesh creep.

iek may be at risk of succeeding too well in his arguments for his own good. At one point, he says that a precise definition of time would be the space of the emergence of something radically new, outside the scope of the possibilities inscribed into any atemporal matrix (230). But, but, if this were true in anything like a precise sense, there could be no question of any emergence out of or into anything whatever; there could only ever be apparitions, out of nowhere. If the Absolute does not slowly and accretively emerge, but bursts at each point unannounced but fully-caparisoned on to the stage of history, it is hard to see what history, in the sense of something building or persisting through change, might mean at all. Each such moment would be a monad, providing itself with its own fixtures and fittings, and sealed off from all previous and subsequent moments, of the priority and posteriority of which it could by no imaginable means inkle. There could be no question of any communication between, let alone anything like a progression from, one such self-begetting epoch to another. iek seems nevertheless oddly determined to protect himself against falling back into a relativist historicism (502) by willing himself into belief in what he boomingly calls true historicity (218), but, given that he has deprived himself of any basis for such a logic of history, can do so only through a kind of chuffing I-think-I-can-I-know-I-can determination to succeed. ieks desire to hang on to historicity amid the force-nine gale of his own arguments also means that, for all his espousal of the radically new, he is Gothically doomed to drag around dogmas of the most clanking antiquity, like the conviction that modern bourgeois society could only have arisen through the mediation of Revolutionary Terror (524). He is

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aggressively certain that there is no substantial historical Spirit weighing up in advance the costs and benefits (525), but nevertheless has no hesitation in valuing historical phenomena as progressive and reactionary, or in defining the proper dialectical response in different circumstances (making one wonder what an improper negation might be exactly, and how you might know).

iek is, to give a nineteenth-century term a retread, a revolutionist, who assumes that revolution itself is its own reason, or at least can be relied upon to kit itself out with its justification later on. iek gives us plenty of pseudo-reasons for revolutionary change, but it is plain that he can only keep up for short sprints his alleged outrage at the exploitation, brutality and misery that are all he will allow to capitalism. The real impulse to revolution is not to put any of this right, but to effect the joyous, violent emergence of the radically new, beyond any kind of prediction, likelihood or drearily utilitarian weighing of consequences. In this, iek may be said to adhere to a wholly formalist theory of revolution, which must be kept vigilantly void of any content save its own vehemence. What revolution is for, is not to usher in utopia, but to keep the dialectic alive. And the dialectic? That cannot be said to be for anything, unless it is, oh lor, to enforce the for-itselfness of the For-itself itself.

ieks other principal purpose in this book, as it has in fact been the guiding ambition of his whole philosophical career, is to reconcile Hegelian philosophy of history with the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan. This might seem to be one of those tall orders that iek has always found so tantalising, since Hegel is supposed (see above) to be the prophet of absolute Spirit, while Lacan is the Sybil of the split subject. The principle of retroactivity is enlisted to provide their rapprochement. Just as each historical moment projects its own past, so the Subject, lacking any kind of intrinsic substance, and struggling in vain to syllable itself in a symbolic order in which every label can be relied upon to be a libel, comes into being in this very shortcoming. It is the failure to add up to a subject that gives rise to oneself as a subject. This makes the Lacanian subject perfectly adapted